Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel hands-on preview and interview – Claptrap down under

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel – it doesn’t take itself entirely seriously

GameCentral gets to play this year’s not-Borderlands 3 sequel, and talk to the Aussie developers that have given it a whole new feel.

The question of when you meet someone to do an interview is often just as important as who you speak to. Meeting the guys behind Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was our very last appointment of the week, at the Gamescom expo earlier in the month. But for the two developers they still had a couple more interviews to go, and when we sat down before them the toil of three days worth of questioning was clearly beginning to show.

Our natural reaction to their weariness was to try and wind them up enough to get them interested, and considering one of them at was an Aussie that provided some easy ammunition. In fact as you probably know the game is primarily being developed by 2K Australia, who have previously helped out on several BioShock games and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

Series creators Gearbox are still involved in an advisory capacity, but the game is not only made by Australians but actually acknowledges that fact – which is extremely unusual in video games.

Before getting a short hands-on with the game we spoke to 2K Australia’s Jonathan Pelling and lead writer Antony Burch from Gearbox about how the game came to embrace its creator’s origins and why the series can now, more than ever, afford to play things silly.

A last gen-only intersequel, that takes place between the events of Borderlands 1 and 2, this is absolutely not Borderlands 3. But it’s also not a full-price piece of DLC and the game features an entirely new team of characters working for the, at this point not-entirely-evil, Handsome Jack.

There’s Athena the Gladiator (from The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC), a tank character who uses a shield to absorb damage and then uses the kinect energy to reflect it back at enemies or throw like Captain America.

Nisha the Lawbringer was previously the sheriff of Lynchwood in Borderlands 2 and has unlockable skills organised around buffs that increase damage, speed, and healing. Wilehem the Enforcer is a more human version of the cyborg boss from Borderlands 2, who adds more mechanical parts as the game progresses.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel – we’re sure there’ll be some mention of kangaroos as well

The character we get to play as though is Claptrap the Fragtrap, one of the series’ iconic utility robots who is now the last of his kind. He’s not much for melee combat (you can see his unicycle style wheel meekly prod at people when you press the button) but he’s just as good with weapons as anyone else.

His primary skill though is the bizarre VaultHunter.exe ability, which picks a semi-random skill that has a percentage chance of being completely useless but which can include abilities from previous characters in the series and does take into account things like your current health and ammo.

What this means in practise is that you have no idea what is going to happen when you press the special button, but the anticipation of what it might be is a great form of entertainment all on its own. We saw him transform into a Gunzerker (now Funzerking) from Borderlands 2, a Mechromancer, and a Psycho-like form that was great a melee combat.

At one point he also wasted all his ammo in a single shot and produced a bomb with an almost impossible to escape from five second fuse, so it really is swings and roundabouts.

In terms of the game in general, it’s all set on the moon of the planet Pandora and its spacestation; which means a lot of low gravity sections that allow you to jump several feet in the air and float along engaged in what are, at least briefly, fully three-dimensional battles.

A lack of oxygen is, as you’d imagine, also a problem but because Claptrap obviously doesn’t breathe it’s incumbent upon that player to be the one that turns on the machines that litter the surface and provide a bubble of breathable air. Not only does this also come in handy for setting people on fire but oxygen is what powers the jetpacks everyone’s using, so they’re essential for Claptrap too.

Naturally the game’s four-player first person action is still essentially the same as before, but simply by changing the setting in this way it feels more distinct an experience than many a fully-fledged sequel we’ve played. We especially liked some of the weapon features, such as the new ice (sorry, ‘cryo’) guns and lasers which help to sell the more sci-fi setting and provide new tactical opportunities.

Unlike other last gen-only games this year, such as Assassin’s Creed Rogue, the relatively low tech visuals were more noticeable than they might have been but we’re sure Gearbox want to ensure the jump to Borderlands 3 appears as extreme as possible.

And yet from everything we can gather The Pre-Sequel is no lazy cash-in, and although you could perhaps characterise it as a feature-length expansion given how good previous Bordlerlands add-ons have been that’s not really a criticism either.

GC: You must be very excited to do your 300th interview on a Friday afternoon.

AB: 301st actually! You win the prize! [laughs]

GC: [lying] I saw the next guy outside and he was very keen to ask about frame rates and resolution.

AB: [sighs] Oh. Fine.

GC: So, I haven’t seen the game since the unveiling but I think it’s really great that a European team is getting a chance to put some of their cultural influence into such a big name game…

JP: Aussie! Aussie team.

GC: What?

JP: We’re 2K Australia.

GC: I thought it was 2K Austria?

JP: [laughs] Australia, not Austria.

GC: I feel so embarrassed.

All: [laughs]

GC: Where’s Australia then? Is that the little one south of New Zealand?

JP: [laughs] Oh yeah, that’s it.

All: [laughs]

GC: OK, in all seriousness it is great to see a different culture reflected in a game. I meet all these developers from all these different countries, but you’d never guess for a second where they come from based on the games they make. I think 50 per cent of the devs I’ve met this week have been from Sweden, but I don’t remember the country ever even been mentioned in a video game before. So how comes you got to put your own stamp on this?

JP: [laughs] Well, we have our team in Australia and the team at Gearbox working on it. We have a couple of English writers, actually, working out at 2K Australia and working with Antony from Gearbox. And… you know it’s a journey, whenever you’re making a game, and we’re leaving Pandora; in this game, for the first time ever in Borderlands; and it just made sense to have this different culture up there on the moon. Because it’s a completely new location and… why not Australia?

GC: Well, because it’s not America. That’s the usual reason why not in most publisher’s eyes.

AB: [laughs] Well, you know when we met each other at GDC last year and really kind of hit it off… I missed out on that because I was still working on the Tiny Tina DLC but when I finally got to meet the guys Matt Armstrong and I were noticing all the things we had in common but also all the things that were quirks…

And we were thinking about what it meant to leave Pandora, and something that we realised is that this is a huge opportunity to expand the universe. Not just by adding names to things but by finally being able to introduce a little more diversity and culture. And when Jon’s team at 2K Australia was showing their temporary VO [voice over] to show how the missions worked it was kind of funny, because they were trying to achieve American accents but they were clearly Australian.

GC: Just like Avatar!

All: [laughs]

AB: [laughs] And when we listened to it, we were like, ‘This is great!’ At first it was funny because, ‘Ha ha ha, they don’t sound like us!’ But then as we were really thinking about it, it was like this is exactly what this moon needs. It needs this change of pace, it needs to be different like that. And we teamed up to flesh out what the dialogue would be and to make sure these sort of Australian-isms were present, because we really wanted the moon to feel organic that way.

JP: Yeah, I think it made development really smooth as well, because Borderlands is the type of game where you can throw out to anyone on the team and say, ‘Hey guys, does anyone have any ideas for a really cool character or a really cool side mission?’ And when we said we can make this Australian or Commonwealth themed they really jumped at the idea to bring in some of our culture. I mean we have a whole side mission about cricket in this game.

GC: Just as it should be. [laughs] So do you think it’s just because the game is already essentially a comedy that you’re able to do this? If you were trying to make say… a GTA clone set in Australia, which would be great, would that have been a lot more difficult? Is it only because of the self-mocking humour that it suddenly becomes viable?

AB: It really made sense to do it for this game because… the inhabitants of the moon are these ex-Dahl engineers and they’ve gone a little bit stir crazy, and that means we get to play up that whole Australia-as-a-colony idea; which works and it’s having a bit of a laugh at ourselves at the same time.

So I think, when it makes sense… I mean it’s always cool to experience other countries and other cultures through video games, and there have been a few that have done it recently, and I think we we really excited to do it. And the important thing is it made sense, and it really worked in this game.

GC: What else do you get from being set on the moon? Is it low gravity all the time?

JP: It kind of varies actually. On the moon’s surface it’ll be very low gravity, because clearly we used the Earth’s moon as the inspiration for this. But the gravity on the surface of Elpis is low, so you can take advantage of all these really cool gameplay features. 1) Because it’s fun and 2) Because it’s a very practical way of training for these mechanics. Because it’s the first place you go to and you need to learn these things, and it would be kind of crazy if we saved them for later in the game.

We have made the promise that you’ll go to the moonbase though, which is called Helios. And on Helios, where there’s a normal atmosphere and it’s a working area, the idea that they’d be constructing this structure and people are working on it day-to-day with no gravity felt odd. It didn’t seem as if it’d be very practical. So there you’ll turn back to normal gravity, and we kind of go back and forth; there are scenarios on Elpis where they have gravity generators and it allows you to walk normally.

AB: I think it was really cool for us… starting this game the two things we knew we had to do was go to the moon and go to that spacestation. And when you played the Tiny Tina DLC it was going into Dungeons & Dragons, and fantasy, and there were these promises that fans were going to expect, and we knew that if people knew we were going to the moon there are these moon promises that they’ll expect. And it was very important for us to make it work, to not be gimmicky.

It’s not easy to do low gravity in a video games, so when we made the decision to do it: ‘OK, we need to go the full distance with this and make sure it affects every single system. All the enemies are gonna have to use it, you’re going to have to have skills that work with it… So it was a big investment for us, but it paid off because it’s really fun to be able to do that slam down on enemies. It’s really satisfying.

GC: So what were the sort of things fans were asking for? I imagine as soon as they found out where it was set they had a whole list of stuff. I also get the impression that the characters are a reaction to fan requests as well?

AB: Certainly, when we made Borderlands 2… it takes place in this unexplained length of time after Borderlands 1. And what we communicated was that was long enough for some very significant things to happen, and then we introduced people like Wilhelm and Nisha, that have a clear history with Jack, and so we knew we needed to be answering these questions, otherwise it would certainly be frustrating for fans, because we made this game in the middle that doesn’t really resolve anything.

But also, we love expanding on lore and we do it in very interesting ways. And so this felt like one of the opportunities for us to better explain some of these concepts that we just floated out there in Borderlands 2.

JP: It was really cool for us as well, because coming into this franchise – previously we worked on the BioShock games – we were fans of the games and we had our things we wanted to explore and bring into the story. So that was a really cool opportunity for us as well.

GC: I like the new types of weapons as well, it always seemed like you could go further with them in the previous games.

AB: Yeah, we’ve brought in the ice element damage type; so that goes across guns, grenades, enemies and all kinds of things. So you can actually freeze and shatter enemies, and because we’re going to the moon and the spacestation it’s a little bit more sci-fi, and so we brought in lasers as well.

GC: One of the things I find encouraging about the new generation is that lots of games are now taking a more fantastical, more game-y approach. They’re less worried about being ‘grounded’ and ‘plausible’. Even COD has lasers and colours now. But the original Borderlands came out at the pinnacle of the whole grimdark era, so is there any sense with this game, and going forward, that you can afford to be even more inventive and weird? That the market has changed enough to support that?

AB: Sure, I think something that worked out really well for us is that Borderlands 1, from the get-go, was over-the-top and very irreverent. There was a very serious, kind of downer nature to the story about these people that had been abandoned by corporations and some are mad and some are trying to make the best of a really awfully situation, but this is all balanced out by these impossibly cool powers and guns that fire bullets that ignite people.

So every time that we’ve been able to expand on that, whether it’s in DLC or a new game, we’ve always wanted to go, ‘Well, we’ve done this and that was awesome but how do we make this even better?’ Because we want to always feel like we’re bringing something fresh to the table, we don’t want to feel we’re just recycling.

GC: But do you feel less constrained? Because being over-the-top five years ago just meant having a game world composed of three colours instead of just two. I mean things like Claptrap’s super abilities are pretty odd, which is great!

AB: [laughs] I don’t know if we really felt constrained by anything, I think we’re just expanding our imagination.

GC: So it wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just a natural evolution?

AB: I think it’s just a natural evolution, yeah.

GC: I don’t know why everyone’s doing it at the same time then, but well… I’m just glad they are.

JP: [laughs]

GC: OK, well I’m getting the nod from the PR so I guess we better call it quits, but it’s been great.